Ringo Lam and the allure of Hong Kong New Wave action films
If history tends to remember John Woo as the 1A of the Hong Kong New Wave that revolutionised action cinema and inspired the medium for generations to come, then Ringo Lam would undoubtedly be the 1B, and the connections between them run deep.
Inspired by the breakout success of Woo’s 1986 masterpiece A Better Tomorrow, Lam announced his arrival as a formidable directorial talent the very next year when City on Fire was unleashed, with Chow Yun-fat playing the lead role in both.
Each of them influenced Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in their own way, and when they made their respective jumps to Hollywood, Woo and Lam decided the best way to go about was with a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle, which resulted in Hard Target and Maximum Risk.
Whereas Woo became the face of heroic bloodshed, though, Lam was always more scathing in his socio-political commentary. His first four features were all comedies written by other people that didn’t reflect who he wanted to be as a filmmaker, but City on Fire most definitely was. Giving rise to spiritual sequels Prison on Fire and School on Fire, Lam used the action genre as a means to critique the shortcomings of modern Hong Kong society, passing judgment on violence, criminality, and education.
The New Wave may have technically ignited in the late 1970s after a new generation of filmmakers raised on a steady diet of Western cinema began to apply those conventions with a dash of local flavour, but it wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s that it truly began to catch fire, with Lam one of the names most intrinsically associated with the cinematic sea-change.
Not content with pushing stylistic boundaries in their work, the most famous faces of the new era kept genuine social and societal concerns either at the forefront of their stories or lurking just beneath the surface, giving the films added bite that openly raged against a machine that had stymied Hong Kong in their eyes. Based on nothing but the rapturous acclaim and huge ticket sales that greeted the finest examples of the New Wave, audiences were of a very similar mind.
Lam and Woo both benefitted immensely from the radiant star power of Yun-fat, with the former’s The Killer and Hard Boiled sitting comfortably alongside the latter’s City on Fire and Full Contact as a quartet of Hong Kong’s finest actioners, with every single one of them trading in similar themes of duplicity, corruption, and brutality.
The backdrops were grounded, gritty, tangible, and easily identifiable to local viewers, while the stories themselves and the set pieces contained therein gave those movies wide-ranging appeal that struck a nerve with genre junkies the world over. It was the perfect storm at the perfect time, and with major multi-billion dollar Hollywood franchises like The Matrix and John Wick wearing their New Wave influences proudly on their sleeves, the impact has been as undeniable as it has been long-lasting.
As can be inferred from the titles, Lam’s Prison on Fire and School on Fire narrowed the focus to the unflinching harshness of incarcerated life and the flaggingly ineffectual educational system, furthering the filmmaker’s agenda to use populist crowd-pleasers as a vessel to comment on the very real concerns and questions being raised by the very demographic who couldn’t get enough of them.
In a world where the action arena has become increasingly safe and homogenised to the point of formula, it’s easy to forget just how strong a wind the New Wave blew through the art form on a global scale. Whereas Hollywood was happy to maintain its musclebound mantra, Lam was one of the figureheads placing everyman figures at the centre of an explosive term, a bandwagon his American contemporaries wouldn’t hop onto for years to come.
